OneWorld.net (U.S.)

WASHINGTON, D.C., Jul 15 (OneWorld) - Anti-genocide activists have launched a new campaign to increase U.S. television coverage of mass killings in Darfur, Sudan--described by the United Nations as the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

''Genocide is the ultimate crime against humanity and a government-backed genocide is unfolding in the Darfur region of the Sudan. As the horror in Darfur continues, our major television news networks are largely missing in action,'' said organizers of the Be A Witness Campaign.

The campaign--run by the American Progress Action Fund and the Genocide Intervention Fund--asks Americans to send a message to networks to ''be a witness'' to what the U.S. government has termed genocide in Darfur.

Campaigners said they hoped increased coverage would move voters to press elected officials to take decisive action to stop the fighting between rebels and government-backed militias and to protect civilians targeted by both sides for murder and rape.

''Television has told us stories of important human brutality before, and Americans have responded by demanding action from our elected representatives,'' the campaign said, citing examples including the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s and the 1980s Ethiopian famine.

The vast majority of Americans continue to rely overwhelmingly on broadcast and cable television as their primary source of information, said campaigners, citing findings from the private Pew Research Center for People and the Press.

Major U.S. networks, however, have largely ignored the Darfur crisis in what the American Journalism Review has described as an ''eerie echo'' of media neglect of the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

''During June 2005, CNN, FOX News, NBC/MSNBC, ABC, and CBS ran 50 times as many stories about Michael Jackson and 12 times as many stories about Tom Cruise as they did about the genocide in Darfur,'' the campaign said, citing the private Tyndall Report, which monitors broadcast media.

Last year, the ABC, CBS, and NBC network nightly newscasts aired a total of only 26 minutes on genocide and fighting in Sudan, the Tyndall Report found. ABC devoted 18 minutes to Darfur coverage, NBC five and CBS only three. By contrast, lifestyle doyenne Martha Stewart's woes received 130 minutes of nightly news coverage.

''Stated differently, only about one in every 950 minutes of news coverage in 2004 covered the genocide in Sudan,'' campaigners said.

The American Journalism Review, in a March 2005 assessment, credited the Washington Post and the New York Times with leading ''persistent, on-the-ground coverage'' of the Darfur crisis.

But the industry magazine said newspapers on the whole appeared to do little better than TV.

''Many of the stories on Sudan published in the nation's newspapers tended to be 500 words or less, giving short shrift to a complex conflict with powerful ethnic, religious and economic factors. Many accounts lacked historical context or perspective, often oversimplifying the bloodshed in Darfur. And few of them appeared on the front page,'' said Sherry Ricchiardi, a senior writer at the Review.

''Only a handful of newspapers have sent their own correspondents to the scene. Foreign desks more often turn to wire service briefs or an occasional piece by a stringer,'' Ricchiardi said.

''Journalists and critics cite a number of factors for the scant coverage of such a harrowing and significant story, including the difficulty of gaining access to Darfur, budget constraints, the war in Iraq and a presumed lack of interest in Africa,'' she added.

Violence in Darfur, now in its third year, has killed as many as 400,000 people and forced some 2.5 million to flee their homes and villages, according to Africa Action, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group that began sounding the alarm in 2000 over what it saw as an impending crisis in the resource-rich but mostly barren region.

The death toll will exceed one million people by the end of the year, the organization warned, unless bold steps are taken to rein in the conflict between rebel groups of African descent and Arab militias that the regime in Khartoum stands accused of arming and abetting.

The fighting started over rebels' claims that the government had deliberately neglected the region, starving it of basic services and development money. It has been compounded by competition for control of local oil, gas, and mineral resources.

And even as government and rebel forces implement a peace process in the country's South, Khartoum appears to be girding for new violence in eastern Sudan, where local populations also are rebelling against the government, according to Africa Action.

African peacekeepers have impressed international observers with their efforts in Darfur but they remain too few and too skimpily supported to protect civilians and restore order. Chief among their constraints, they lack a political mandate to intervene in fighting to protect civilians, said Ann-Louise Colgan, Africa Action's director of policy analysis.